1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an input apparatus, an input method and an input program for providing an example expression to a user that may be suitable to the user's usage history.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, the practical use of human interfaces utilizing speech input has expanded. For instance, a speech-operated system exists in which a user provides speech input to enter a particular preset command, and the system recognizes the speech input to execute the operation corresponding to the command, thus allowing the user to operate the system by speech. In addition, a system is available in which a user speaks a sentence, and the system analyzes and converts the sentence to a character string, thus allowing the creation of text by speech input.
Furthermore, the following systems also exist: a speech-to-speech translation system which translates speech input in a first language into a second language and outputs the translated speech to support interlingual communications, and a spoken dialog system which is intended to allow for spoken interaction between a user and the system.
In these systems, speech recognition technology is used which converts a speech signal spoken by a user to digital data, and compares the data with predetermined data patterns to recognize the speech.
In speech recognition, incorrect recognition is likely to occur because of the influence of noise in the surrounding environment, as well as differences in speech quality, volume and speech speed of a particular user. In addition, since a user has to provide a speech input again if the first speech input is incorrectly recognized, significant effort can be required to operate such systems. Furthermore, when a given sentence is accepted, subsequent processing loads such as for comparison processing using accepted sentences are increased due to the additional data, and this can cause more difficulty in obtaining sufficient accuracy in the speech recognition process.
In Patent Reference 1 (Jpn. Pat. Appln. KOKAI No. 2000-200275), an input apparatus is proposed in which examples are presented to a user including descriptions of speech input entries, the user references the examples, and the user partially edits one of the examples to create a speech input. According to this method, since the entries can be restricted to the examples presented to the user or the partially edited example, the speech recognition process can be performed with a high degree of accuracy. In addition, since the user can reference the examples to obtain the guidance of the speech input entry descriptions, speech entry processing can be performed more easily.
However, the method of Patent Reference 1 has the limitation that the examples to be presented to the user are already prepared in the input apparatus, and therefore suitable candidates cannot be presented for all users such as those having differences in gender, ages, occupations and travel experiences.
Thus, in most cases, it is necessary to partially edit an example using this method, and thus a user has to make a speech input almost all the time. In addition, the method requires speech recognition that is sometimes performed incorrectly. Thus, a user may have to perform multiple iterations of speech reentry when incorrect speech recognition cannot be reduced.
The invention has been made in view of these circumstances.